Trainee Detectives Only Need to Have Watched Sherlock Now

Scotland Yard is about to rip up the rule book of high level policing, with the need to have served a police career before switching into the exciting TV world of the detective about to be dropped.

This means that anyone with a graduate-level education should be able to go straight into the normal clothes wearing part of the London force, skipping the years of beat-pounding and call-responding previously required.

A two-year trainee scheme will take anyone abandoning another career into the investigative world, with Met Police chief super Stephen Clayman telling the BBC that: "We're looking at people who have perhaps considered policing in the past, and perhaps didn’t consider it because the uniformed pathway wasn’t something that appealed to them. We know from the market testing we did last year, quite extensively, that this is extremely appealing to those sorts of people."

A degree and passing a fitness test is all that's needed, although preference will be given to people able to name more than ten Columbo guest stars. [The Times]